Word: tailism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...told the comrades: in their zeal to defeat Hitler, he and the other chieftains around headquarters had "dragged at the tail end of Roosevelt . . . did not adequately maintain our own Communist identity and vanguard role." This is the sin now known, in the Aesopian doubletalk of communism, as "tailism." Browder, said Dennis, was still hypnotized by his "original opportunist illusions." But Dennis' eyes had been opened. To the barricades...
Head-Scratching. As the trial lumbered on, the ideological gobbledygook of communism poured in full flood into the ears of Court and jury. Browder, among other things, was accused of the Communist sin of "tailism." "It sounds like some kind of special jargon," the judge said plaintively, and pleaded for an explanation of terms...
Budenz obliged. In committing tailism, Browder was riding the ideological coattails of such "bourgeois" thinkers as Franklin Roosevelt. Opportunistic error, said Budenz, was failing to follow the Marxist-Leninist line. Revisionism was erroneously believing in peaceful progress towards socialism. And just plain Browder-ism: being guilty of all the other errors in one big lump...
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